Thursday Thread
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This Heritage Foundation chart has Slow Boring staff debating whether kids these days aren’t working hard enough (less than two hours per day studying??) or we geriatric millennials are misremembering how hard we worked in college.
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It's insane to me that no one's written the big expose on college GPA adjustment formulas yet. Every remotely competitive college has GPA weighting formulas that the use to adjust GPAs in an effort to correct for grade inflation and the profoundly different meaning of the same grades at different schools. They're proprietary and secret and probably play a profound role in who gets into college, which is a constant source of clicks. As far as I know they often involve curving for a given high school based on previous applicants from the same school, but nobody really knows. And there's as yet no big NYT or New Yorker or whatever investigation. They're secret formulas that decide who gets into college, and nobody cares! Baffling.
As someone who's been a college professor for 26 years, I would say that my students are spending less time on their studies than 20 years ago. Even though much of the reading is posted online, few students actually complete it. Instead, they have become heavily dependent on notes, power points, and slides.
As an instructor, this makes it easier to separate the "A" students from the rest of the students. In their in-class essay exams, the "A" students have done the readings and can tell me (accurately) what Scholar X said vs. Scholar Y vs. Scholar Z. Everyone else is just spouting off generalities and summarizing stuff in the notes. They get low Bs, Cs, Ds, and even Fs.
It is what it is. I write a lot of letters for students who want to go to law school, and I always laud the students who have put the work in. For the rest, I have what I call my "mediocre but well-intentioned" letter where I damn these students with faint praise.